II. The Idea of Personality and of Art as an intermediate agency of Personality, as embodied in Browning's Poetry.

III. Mr. Browning's "Obscurity". { This section contains Browning's `My Last Duchess'}

Wanting is -- What? My Star. The Flight of the Duchess. The Last Ride Together. By the Fireside. Prospice. Amphibian. James Lee's Wife. A Tale. Confessions. Respectability. Home-Thoughts from Abroad. Home-Thoughts from the Sea. Old Pictures in Florence. Pictor Ignotus. Andrea del Sarto. Fra Lippo Lippi. A Face. The Bishop orders his Tomb. A Toccata of Galuppi's. Abt Vogler. `Touch him ne'er so lightly', etc. Memorabilia. How it strikes a Contemporary. "Transcendentalism". Apparent Failure. Rabbi Ben Ezra. A Grammarian's Funeral. An Epistle containing the Strange Medical Experience of Karshish, the Arab Physician. A Martyr's Epitaph. Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister. Holy-Cross Day. Saul. A Death in the Desert.

Wanting is -- What? My Star. The Flight of the Duchess. The Last Ride Together. By the Fireside. Prospice. Amphibian. James Lee's Wife. A Tale. Confessions. Respectability. Home Thoughts, from Abroad. Home Thoughts, from the Sea. Old Pictures in Florence. Pictor Ignotus. Andrea del Sarto. Fra Lippo Lippi. A Face. The Bishop orders his Tomb. A Toccata of Galuppi's. Abt Vogler. "Touch him ne'er so lightly." Memorabilia. How it strikes a Contemporary. "Transcendentalism": Apparent Failure. Rabbi Ben Ezra. A Grammarian's Funeral. An Epistle containing the Strange Medical Experience of Karshish, the Arab Physician. A Martyr's Epitaph. Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister. Holy-Cross Day. Saul. A Death in the Desert.

A LIST OF CRITICISMS OF BROWNING'S WORKS.

I. The Spiritual Ebb and Flow exhibited in English Poetry from Chaucer to Tennyson and Browning.

Literature, in its most restricted art-sense, is an expression in letters of the life of the spirit of man co-operating with the intellect. Without the co-operation of the spiritual man, the intellect produces only thought; and pure thought, whatever be the subject with which it deals, is not regarded as literature, in its strict sense. For example, Euclid's `Elements', Newton's `Principia', Spinoza's `Ethica', and Kant's `Critique of the Pure Reason', do not properly belong to literature. (By the "spiritual" I would be understood to mean the whole domain of the emotional, the susceptible or impressible, the sympathetic, the intuitive; in short, that mysterious something in the constitution of man by and through which he holds relationship with the essential spirit of things, as opposed to the phenomenal of which the senses take cognizance.)

The term literature is sometimes extended in meaning (and it may be so extended), to include all that has been committed to letters, on all subjects. There is no objection to such extension in ordinary speech, no more than there is to that of the signification of the word, "beauty" to what is purely abstract. We speak, for example, of the beauty of a mathematical demonstration; but beauty, in its strictest sense, is that which appeals to the spiritual nature, and must, therefore, be concrete, personal, not abstract. Art beauty is the embodiment, adequate, effective embodiment, of co-operative intellect and spirit, -- "the accommodation," in Bacon's words, "of the shows of things to the desires of the mind."